In case you've been hiding under a rock for the past few months, let me tell you about the latest food craze in New York, on the interwebs and pretty much all around the world. Pastry Chef Dominique Ansel spent 2 months in his magical test kitchen and created the Cronut™, a half doughnut, half croissant pastry lovechild that somehow turned every living human on Earth into Homer Simpson and all they can think about is the Cronut™.

Cronuts Mania

Since it was first introduced on May 10th, 2013, people have gone nuts for it. For those lucky enough to actually be in New York, they start lining up at around 6 AM, and line up for hours waiting for the Soho bakery to open at 8 AM - and it actually sells out within 2 hours of opening, so if you've been in line and they run out? Tough luck. Then we have people selling Cronuts on the black market for Cronuts for 4x the price (Cronuts are $5 a pop at the bakery). People are so in love with the Cronut that they even use it as a tool to express their ultimate form of love, with Cronut proposals. Then of course, with anything that blows up so quickly, there are some Cronut copycats too.

With all this Cronut hype, did I hop on the bandwagon to get my fix? Well, if you knew anything about me, you'd know I really dislike long waits and also am not a huge sweets fan. So when I heard about the Cronut, I didn't even bother.

Then, one magical day earlier this month, my coworker, E, was visiting from LA and decided to bring these beauties to the office...

In Cronut Heaven covered in Blackberry for July's flavor, photo credit to E

Last summer, J and I were hooked to MasterChef and were both cheering on Christine, The Blind Cook on the show. At first we were a bit skeptical, like a lot of viewers out there. Seriously, how could she pull through so many challenges without being able to see?

The one challenge that impressed us both was a challenge where the contestants had to reproduce a dish that Graham Elliot makes at his Michelin Star rated restaurant, a white tuna dish - one that he's actually served to President Obama in the past. The other four final contestants were able to see the plating of the dish in addition to tasting it. Christine however, being visually impaired, could only taste the dish and touch to feel the plating of it.

Despite having such a huge disadvantage, Christine had such finesse in her knife work on slicing the raw fish (while others CLEARLY butchered it - it was difficult to watch) and by the end of the episode, her dish came out to be the best replication of Graham's dish.

We were super super super impressed and in awe of such culinary talent and dedication. Seriously what an inspiration! So, imagine our surprise when we find out around finale time, that Christine is actually cousins with one of our close friends in Manhattan?

Dinner at Blue Hill at Stone Barns with Christine & Pauline

Since winning MasterChef, Christine has visited New York a few times so I've had the pleasure of meeting her during our dinner at Blue Hill at Stone Barns. During that meal I was definitely feeling a bit fan-girl like and a bit star struck.

Since then, I've had the time to process the shock and have been able to act like a much more normal person around Christine. She is so sweet and down to earth, pretty much what you expect her to be like from watching her on the show. Christine mentioned that she thinks she's actually a bit edgier in real life than they portrayed her on the show since they chose to set her up to be the innocent sweet one.

On one of her recent trips to Manhattan, we wanted to meet up at Danji for dinner but realized it was closed for an event. So, we decided to go to Yakitori Totto instead.

Yakitori Totto is the sister restaurant to one of my favorite ramen places in the city, Totto Ramen. If you are looking to skip the hour plus wait at Totto Ramen and grab a bowl at Yakitori Totto instead, you are making a big mistake. I know this because I thought I could cheat the system and skip the wait. Don't make my mistake, don't go to Yakitori Totto and order a bowl of ramen, go to Yakitori Totto and order its namesake.

At around 8PM on a weeknight, we ended up having to wait 20-30 minutes, which is considered short. If you're here during the weekend, be prepared to wait for at least an hour or more. Sometimes larger parties get lucky if the tables happen to open up.

The yakitori here is definitely high in the ranks of the best in Manhattan. There is a $20 minimum per person limit, but don't worry, it won't be too difficult to surpass that minimum.

So here's what we ended up ordering for 4 people...

Appetizers

Of all the appetizers/small dishes we ordered to share, their Braised Pork Belly was definitely our favorite. Melt-in-your-mouth tender, awesome braising liquids and even served with a fish ball on the side!

Braised Pork Belly - on the special menu - RECOMMENDED

Monkfish Liver

Prior to this meal, I had never tried Monkfish Liver. It was a lot chewier and denser than I imagined it to be. Personally, I wasn't a fan, but was informed by Christine that that's what monkfish liver is pretty much supposed to taste like.

I love gluttonous rice anything, so another favorite of mine was the Tori Dango which basically is rice covering a chicken meatball.

Tori Dango: steamed rice dumplings w/ chicken meatballs inside

Sato Yosuke’s Inaniwa Udon: Served Chilled

Another dish I found interesting but didn't fully love was their chilled udon. The texture of the noodles was a bit odd to me and almost reminded me of really fresh pho noodles. It had a dipping sauce on the side with tons of scallions which I love. I guess it's okay to share, but wasn't spectacular to me.

I was also intrigued by the Deep-fried Small Silver Fish. Silver fish might look a bit creepy but my parents used to steam it with ground pork to serve with rice. Here - it's deep fried and honestly I couldn't really taste much past the overall greasiness of the fried coating. Might be good to eat as munchies with beer or sake.

Shirauo Kara-age: deep-fried small silver fish

Yakitori

Moving on to the namesake, the yakitori. All of the yakitori we ordered were solid, but a few highlights for me for the night is the Stuffed Shishito Peppers. The shishito peppers, stuffed with chicken and glazed with a sweet teriyaki sauce. Loved the charred bits too.

Bacon wrapped anything is good, so the Bacon-wrapped Enoki Mushrooms was definitely a highlight. Another fun dish we ordered was the ginkgo nuts which didn't taste that distinct for me, but we wanted to try it.

After we finished some of our yakitori, we were still hungry, so we ordered more. They had the sukiyaki beef as a special, so we ordered it. I really enjoyed this one as it had a good mix of veggies and meat in it. Covered in the sukiyaki sauce, who can really complain?

Sukiyaki: vegetable & mushroom wrapped in washu beef

Tsukune: meatball w/ sauce

Yaki Nasu Miso Dengaku: eggplantw/ miso paste

Dessert

At the end of the meal, we decided to try out the Japanese Green Tea Affogato dessert. Usually a traditional affogato is espresso with ice cream. Here at Yakitori, they had us pour green tea over red bean, mochi and ice cream. I thought it was a fun and delicious twist to the usual dish.

Dinner at Yakitori Totto is always solid and good. It was fun catching up with Christine again and hearing about all her new adventures since being titled a MasterChef.

Her cookbook, Recipes from my Home Kitchen, came out a few months ago, and of course I had to get it signed! I really enjoyed the fusion approach to the cookbook since it features comfort food from both her Asian (Vietnamese) upbringing, as well as some American classics. I definitely recommend you check it out - it's even listed now as a top seller on the New York Times list!

Now that I'm settled back in Manhattan, there is one brunch dish in LA that's remained on my mind - this amazing Bread Pudding with caramelized banana served with steamed milk at Urth Caffé. I mean, just check out the glistening crunchy top on this banana...

Breaking it felt like breaking the top of a crème brûlée, and who doesn't love that? Then, take this dish and pour steamed milk over it, and you have the best bread pudding, EVER.

Now if that doesn't convince you that Urth Caffé is worth checking out, let me tell you more about this LA hot spot. There's four locations, the one I went to was in Beverly Hills where there's supposedly tons of celebrity sightings if you're into that. (I know I am! Too bad we didn't see anyone when I visited).

From the outside, it looks like a cute mom 'n pop shop with its white fences. Inside, they have a variety of pastries, cakes and baked goods. They're known for their organic coffee and super cute lattes with Hello Kitty foam on top.

I was yelled at while I took this pic since they seem to have a "no photos" policy - must be for the celebrities' sake

But, since I came here post-cleanse, I was trying to explore the healthier options. Since we're in LA, it was not too hard finding clean eats. Although they didn't have the green juice I was craving, I settled for the Mixed Veggies Juice - carrot, beet, celery and ginger. Love that you can still see different juices tie-dyed with the foam on top. Yum!

Even their Oatmeal was fun. Full disclosure: I've actually never ordered oatmeal at a restaurant before, but I loved the different toppings here, especially their Urth Granola. It was also served with steamed milk on the side which was a fun way to let you control how thick you want your oatmeal to be.

A few weeks ago, I went to a 4th of July potluck and wanted to bring something that was a bit light and on the healthier side. After consulting the interwebs for a fun salad to make, I settled on Giada De Laurentiis's recipe for this Isreali Couscous Salad with Smoked Paprika.

Ever since I bought smoked paprika a few months ago, I've been obsessed with finding different ways to use it. It has this smoky flavor and not at spicy like regular paprika. I was so excited to try this new use of smoked paprika, and I'm glad I did.

This recipe is super easy and only requires a little bit of prep work: chop up the spinach, quarter the grape tomatoes, rough chop the roasted red peppers, red onions, parsley and mint. In your multi-tasking, you also have to whip up a quick smoked paprika vinaigrette.

A few weeks ago, I planned a semi-homemade juice cleanse for me and three of my coworkers. Instead of buying the cleanse from the website which usually sells for ~$185 for a three day cleanse, we were trying to figure out ways to do it for cheaper.

Originally, I was going to be ambitious and do the complete DIY route since I've considered it in the past, but I became overwhelmed by thelogisticsof it all:

1) How would I make the juices in bulk in my tiny tiny Manhattan kitchen?
2) How would I transport jugs of juices to my coworkers on the subway?

The answer was I wasn't going to. That's when I decided that we could just buy 3 of the 6 juices per day from Fresh Direct and get it delivered straight to work. The other 3 green juices we were able to get from our cafe at work. Score. I decided to do a four day cleanse, with my juices costing ~$30 per day. Not too bad for a day's worth of "food".

A few weeks ago, I decided to finally give the BluePrint Juice Cleanse a try. Having tried the Clean Cleanse twice in the past two years, I wanted to see how my body would respond differently to an all-juice cleanse versus the Clean Cleanse which allowed me to have one meal a day.

There were two main cons that I thought about the BluePrint Cleanse: 1) I would just be so hungry that I couldn't do just juice for 3 days and 2) the cleanse was expensive, it cost $185 for 3 days of juices. Here's how I worked to fix these two issues:

Suffering.Since misery loves company, I recruited 3 coworkers to try it with me so that I would have a bit more of a support system as I was suffering. I told them I would organize it and be their cleanse leader, all they had to do was do it with me. Looking back, this was a great idea, doing this with friends made it 10x more enjoyable.

Cost.First, I contemplated going a completely DIY route since it seemed pretty easy to make the juices, all we had to do was use the juicer at work to make our juices every day. However, as I thought more about the logistics of it, I realized that it was a bad idea. How was I going to make 4-5 different kinds of juices and transport it to the office for my coworkers to enjoy?

As an alternative, I decided to channel my inner Sandra Lee and go the semi homemade route.